Digital Marketers
In 2015, digital marketers increasingly turned to many proven tactics
in an effort to reach customers, according to SEMPO's "2015 State of
Search Report." These include SEO (employed by 94% of digital marketer
respondents vs. 85% tallied in 2013), email marketing (86% vs. 63%),
social media marketing (84% vs. 75%), paid search campaigns (83% vs.
78%), display ads (70% vs. 54%), and social media advertising (57%).
Ad
blocking grabbed a lot of headlines and attention in 2015. In the past
year, Apple rolled out its iOS 9 with built-in ad blocking as an option.
PageFair and Adobe's "The Cost of Ad Blocking" report estimates that
ad-blocking usage by Americans increased 48% from June 2014 to June
2015, to 45 million monthly active users.
Despite the ad-blocking
threat, many believe digital marketing made significant strides over the
previous 12 months, including Stacy Gordon, CMO of LatentView. "This
past year, digital marketing finally moved away from being just about
social media or managing online campaigns to being about insights.
Marketers have increasingly begun looking at digital data to get a
360-degree view of their consumers," Gordon says. "This understanding
has allowed more advanced marketers to deliver customized and
personalized content to consumers by combining tools like geolocation
data and search and browsing history."
In 2015, native advertising
gathered momentum, putting a stronger spotlight on quality content.
"This is prompted by the way people are consuming content via feeds and
the shift to mobile and away from standard display," says Chris Tuff,
EVP and director of business development and partnerships at 22squared.
One
of the most important battles waged in 2015 was "mobilegeddon"--another
name for Google's algorithm update last April that gives priority to
sites that display well on mobile devices.
